I recently stumbled across a great source of practical, qualified and tailored advice for our company. He knows our business like no-one else, is an expert in his field, always has time for us, and is completely free. (Despite the publishing date of this post, this is not an April Fool’s Joke.) Aaron and I recently had our annual get-together, … Read More
Data can cause pain and irreparable damage
Tracking is deadly. It skews our perception of reality, gives us a dangerously false sense of security, and pushes us into making poor decisions. In our own company, we track the work that we do to near-psychotic levels of accuracy. Note that isn’t a boast thinly veiled to look like criticism (I’m thinking of “my greatest weakness is my attention … Read More
Why shouldn’t you choose a local firm? Because you’re worth it.
As a service provider, who would you think is our biggest competitor? It’s not another SEO agency, and it’s not an AdWords agency. It’s the firm based near where you work, who can walk, drive or commute to where your business is run. This is ludicrous. Historically it made a great deal of sense. Our parents and grandparents did business … Read More
How to adapt to not having keyword data
Last week’s post on Why keywords are no longer relevant to SEO produced more of a reaction than anticipated. Today I’ll show you how to adapt to the new reality. In a sense, Google have done the SEO world a favour, by forcing us away from a flawed model. Even ignoring the (not provided) issue, the fact is that different … Read More
Why keywords are no longer relevant to SEO
SEOs have to take their fingers out of their collective rears. Apologies for the vulgarity (this was the toned-down version) but being an SEO in 2015 means you have to duck and weave with Google, fight web designers, combat the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality, and, depressingly, fight the never-ending wave of ignorance within the SEO industry. I’ll … Read More
The AdWords vs. SEO debate is over
I think it’s time to stop chewing over the SEO vs. AdWords debate. Here’s why. Google have long argued an absolute separation of their organic and paid search results, at least from the point of view of the factors and variables involved. Yet the two sets of results have, over the years, moved closer to each other, both in terms … Read More
The components of loss and retention
Retaining customers has a lot in common with getting more exercise. We know how important it is, we sometimes feel powerless to affect it, and it often takes a crisis to make us actually do something constructive about it. One of the reasons for this is the apparent lack of tangible data points for us to latch on to. Every Wednesday … Read More
What can you do when Google are wrong?
We just discovered a bug in Google Analytics. In itself that’s worrying enough, but Google appear quite adamant that this isn’t an issue. I strongly disagree. Here’s what happened. While recently reviewing organic search traffic in Google Analytics, we noticed that some of what Google was identifying as organic was actually coming from AdWords. When we looked further, Analytics identified … Read More
Does the name really matter?
An enormous amount of time is usually spent naming a product or service, but is this necessary or justified? Conventional marketing thinking certainly thinks so, but I’m starting to think that this may not matter as much as it once did. There are the obvious blunders to avoid – names that are too easily mispronounced, misspelt, have sexual connotations or … Read More
Why are you still using that old thing?
You’re almost certainly running Google Analytics on your website. But have you ever stopped to question why? Most likely it’s down to one of the following: Because it’s free. If so then you might want to question the wisdom of choosing a solution that monitors your website, analyses your online efforts and essentially directs and evaluates all of your digital … Read More
